Gourmet Brothers, a brunch you will forget asap!

Do you know the sentence: “never judges a book by its cover”? Well here is exactly the perfect example. A great website with nice pictures and texts does not necessary means the place is great or even the food is nice. The Gourmet brothers, a bistronomy ambassador in Geneva will let you with this bitter flavor on your throat after trying their sunday brunch. It looks awesome but actually is far away from being half-great. Check it out.

The reservation: make it counts!

The first impression is key, especially if it is the first time you are going to a place. Very often, it starts over the phone. So when you book a sunday brunch for 11:00 am, you get already the information that you will have less than 2 hours to eat, talk to your friends or read the newspaper and basically to enjoy your sunday. Why? Well, because Gourmet Brothers have a second service at 13:00 and they need the table. My experience shows that when this happen, something is not working well. Either the place is too small, or the prices too cheap (rentability) or Lady Gaga tweeted something about. At least if you go there, you will be warned about it.

A buffet style formula but always missing something

The menu is pretty clever. You have a “base” (CHF30.) that represents everything you can eat from the Buffet. Then, you can add extras like pancakes (total CHF34.) or eggs&bacon (total CHF32.). The first point to highlight is that all beverages are extras. If you want a fruit juice or a hot beverage you need to pay for it in addition. Several restaurants include at least an orange juice and a hot beverage. When you see they only proposed orange or lemon as fresh juice and the size of the glass was half of what you would imagine… Then you start wonder.

The buffet was beautifully presented. Each ingredient or dish were presented with their names written on small chalk dashboards. Unfortunately there was always something missing. From 11:30 to 13:00 there was no Foie-Gras whereas it was written at the buffet. Only at 13:00 that the new Foie-Gras arrived. So we did not get the taste of it as we needed to leave before 13:00. Naturally during the entire session there was always something missing, from bread to Ham… Very unpleasant as everybody was spying the arrival of the waiter in order to be lucky enough to get what he would propose. As it is a “bistronomy restaurant” we could see the kitchen from a transperent door. Not very original even though it is always reassuring. Well in this case we could see alot of agitation in the kitchen for not much output as the more they would spin around the pans, the less food would come out. Strange this feeling of professional-over-activism.

A macchiatto and a renversé. No difference a part the price?

One of the customers asked to the waiter about the difference between a Latte Machiatto and a Renversé. The person was really incappable to give the difference while everybody knows that the Latte Macchiato has much more milk and the renversé is the Swiss version of coffee with milk in which the milk and the coffee do not blend. The Latte Macchiato was invented in Italy to facilitate children to drink coffee by adding much more milk. As the waiter was not really helpful the customer concluded there was no difference a part the price. She took the cheapest one.

Not family friendly environment, stand up little darling!

While sunday’s brunches are a great moment to spend with friends and families, probably Gourmet Brothers does not think it is important. That is why they only had 1 child chair and no special menus to children. In total we could count 4 small children in the restaurant. Only one, the one who got first to the restaurant, could get one. When one of the freshly arrived mothers asked for a child chair, the waiter needed to ask in the kitchen if there were any children chairs. After 5 minutes, the mother got the information that there was only one chair. That is why all 3 children were running around in the restaurant like flyes. They could not really sit somewhere. As the place was not very big, you can imagine how peaceful it was.

In conclusion, we can say that unfortunately the concept was more interesting in the website rather than in-situe. The Gourmet Brothers missed one essential aspect of bistronomy trend: the service. At one point, Gourmet Brothers need to review their exercice and start putting themselves in the shoes and the bellies of their customers.

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